Palm Sunday 2007

Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

In a sense, we don’t need a sermon today. The readings we’ve just heard, and the liturgy we’re enacting are a sermon in themselves. For the next week, Christians around the world will in their own distinctive ways be remembering and interpreting the last days and hours of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many of us will be moved afresh to horror, or wonder or compassion as our thoughts dwell on his suffering. The enormous reaction of believers and on-believers alike to the 2004 Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ points to the distressing and transforming power of the story. Perhaps we would be well served as we approach Holy Week again to listen to Jesus’ own caveat: Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

Did you realise that this is the only divine prohibition in the passion story – the only time Jesus says no. He accepts everything else that comes his way. But the passion narrative opens with these words to the women by the wayside. And the resurrection narrative opens with a similar divine prohibition to Mary in the garden; ‘Do not touch me!’

At these extraordinary, pivotal moments, Jesus seems to says no to easy spontaneous emotion, the quick release of tension. Tears for the physical suffering of the one on his way to crucifixion, embraces for the physical body of the risen Lord are, he suggests, both misdirected and dangerous. These surface reactions are too shallow – they focus attention in the wrong place and on the wrong things.

Do not weep for me. Never has the warning been more apposite. We live in a culture which has prostituted feelings. Tears have become part of the ethos of entertainment. We love a good cry, and invariably we feel better afterwards, although we’ve quite forgotten what it was that moved us. Perhaps this explains the curious phenomenon of the extravagance of vicarious grief which has become so much a part of our landscape, at least since the death of Princess Di.

We have become almost completely anaesthetised to the misery and suffering of others, nightly delivered into our lounge rooms through the medium of TV without requiring us to do anything about it. The indifference we show to the people of Iraq. Our passivity in the face of Darfur or Zimbabwe.

But it’s rare that we weep for the things that really matter. It’s rare we weep for the loss of truth in a world of spin. It’s rare we weep for our own complicity in the violence and injustice of the world. It’s rare we weep for the love of God.

As you read again the story of the passion, aren’t you struck by the fact that 2000 years seems to have made precious little difference to humanity. The changes are purely superficial. When the security forces get a victim handcuffed and alone, they just cannot resist the urge to knock him about – he’s fair game in the backroom of Caiaphus’ house or in Abu Ghraib or any other police barracks. Weep for yourselves!

When someone who has learned to play the power game finds their delicately balanced structure of interests threatened, its still expedient to eliminate one unimportant but awkward individual to preserve the balance and keep the peace, whether the manipulator is the High Priest of Jerusalem on the President of Zimbabwe or wherever else you will. Weep for yourselves!

Those who have the power to insist that justice be done still prefer to wash their hands of the matter. And crowds of ordinary decent frightened men and women still yell the slogans of the moment in stead of taking time to reflect and then standing over against them mob. Weep for yourselves!

It is not possible to observe the cross of Christ objectively, from a position of detachment. To be there at all is to be involved, one way or the other. That’s why in the end all but one of the disciples were not there. They weren’t ready to be involved. The daughters of Jerusalem weren’t ready to be involved. The preferred pity to involvement. But not once does Jesus ask us to pity him, nor to pity or brothers and sisters in need, in whom we are meant to find him. Christ in his distressing disguise, Mother Teresa of Calcutta named them.

We’re not called to pity the poor and the marginalised. No, we’re called to feed and clothe them; to visit them in sickness or in prison. We’re called on to become involved with them; involved at the level of our will and our action. So if we’re going to pay attention this week to Jesus passion and resurrection this week, then we are going somehow to find ways to become involved.

We won’t truly become involved in the passion of Jesus unless we are also willing to become more deeply involved in the world. And if we are to do this, its because we learn to see the sufferings of the oppressed and powerless, the hungry and the sick, the refugee and the alien though the lens of this crucifixion. Because here is the true mystery of the cross. Here every human suffering and every human evil is focussed into one single cataclysmic event the death of the son of God.

As sunlight is focussed through the centre of the great Millennium Window in the west end of this Cathedral to produce a great burst of life at the heart of its representation of creation, so in the cross of Jesus we see all of the brokenness, pain and misery of the human race focussed in this one sufferer – who is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Here is the meaning of it all. Here is the truth of it all. Here is the way through it all to the heart of the promise of salvation.

We must resit the temptation to be a sect – to remain a little cluster of devout souls engaged in a religious exercise for the improvement of our souls. If this is our notion of Christianity, it is much too small! To occupy this space is to stand alongside the daughters of Jerusalem and join their lament.

But if we dare to be honest in our response to the call of Christ, if we dare to take the whole cosmos into our gaze this week then truly we will have cause for weeping. For the true perspective of our lives is not the small contained bourgeois world we pretend is ours. Rather it’s the great cosmic stage on which the extremes of the Gospel stand out in sharp relief – light and darkness, life and death, abundance and lack, heaven and hell.

In this struggle of immense opposites the cross of Jesus Christ towers to its full height. For in the world as it is today nothing can save us; not technology nor global economics; not the information revolution nor power politics. But now as ever, the only thing that can save us is an act of God, an outrageous outpouring of grace, bridging the divide, opening the future as an open horizon of possibility, offering the possibility of life in the Kingdom.

*Daughters of Jerusalem, and all you who stand by with them, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

*The original draft of this sermon owes a great deal to the stunning meditation by John V Taylor, in the series entitled Weep not for me: meditations on the cross and the resurrection (Geneva : World Council of Churches, 1986).